Apologies for the tangent but this stuck a chord...
But it doesn't excuse stepping on the kids that get lunch only because it's FREE, and can't afford any of your kid's extracurriculars because they are WORKING to help their families. Those kids don't have tutors to help them keep up the "special" banner, and nobody expects them to be nasty to others, either.
A friend of mine *used* to do recruiting for Carnegie-Mellon until the day that a kid that had stellar grades at school and a full-time job outside school ( he was the main breadwinner for the family) was rejected by the admissions office for not having any extra-curricula activities. Feeding his family was his EC for crying out loud! It was then that he realised that ECs are used as a covert proxy for SES by the admissions office at Carnegie-Mellon. This sickened him so much that after doing the recruiting for years he resigned from it.
